Hi, first of all, I want to express how much I enjoy the game. I bought it after my brother recommended it to me, and I had a blast! I have ~50h playtime, currently level 80. I’m really looking forward to the multiplayer in order to play with my girlfriend! My brother mentioned that feedback was welcome (as the game was still in the works). With that being said, I wanted to offer my fresh outlook on the game. As mentioned in the title, I went for a DoT Lich build.
The Good
I like the pace of the game (high-damage clearly telegraphed attacks) that reward careful positioning/timing versus a more twitchy gameplay (i.e. PoE), but that might be me getting older.
The crafting system feels rewarding to use and I was able to reach endgame with what I found.
The skills and passive skill point forced me to make meaningful decisions, and I still find myself experimenting new ideas.
The filter system, once you understand it, really allows for anyone to tailor the drop they see, albeit it does take some investment in time
The level scaling feels a LOT better than other ARPG. Level = damage penetration is a very elegant solution, and I haven’t experienced (yet?) an exponential damage scaling at later level
What could be better
Quality of life
Filtering could use an “imbrication” systems : I have 20ish affix I’m looking for in my gear for endgame and I want it on very specific base subtype. The only way to select gear subtype is to have only 1 type of item in the base. So I had to create 15 copy of the 20 affixes filter I was looking for, each with a different second condition on the item subtype. I dread the day I’ll decide I want to change one of the affix.
There should be a filter for a minimum forging potential. Picking up good a good magic crafting base only to realise it has 9 crafting potential isn’t fun.
Respecing can be a chore, more so since you have to confirm-clic each time. Because you need to meet a minimum # of passive point for later passive, it happened a few time that I had to respec a point, quit the retrainer window, open my passive tree, spend the point, then re-open the retrainer window, … Being able to shift between “respec” and “spend passive” in the retrainer window would be a big QoL.
Allowing your filter to change the background visual of items in your storage/vendors/inventory would help filter stuff once you pick them up. Ex : I had a green recolor filter on items with +x to skill level to use with runes of shattering, so I know when I pick one from the ground, but I can’t find it easily in my inventory.
DoT build related
DoT builds could use new suffixes on 2h staff and wands : everything that is available is “on hit”, crit and stun are also hit dependant and if you’re not built for freeze (which the acolyte doesn’t offer a lot of), the freeze rate multiplier is also useless.
I don’t know why the choice was made to not include “crit damage reduction” and “+ X to all attribute” on staff, while it is on every other 2-hand weapons. These would have been valid options for DoT build.
New suffixes that increase curse/ailment duration, DoT “tick” frequency, resistance shred on DoT or other effects that trigger on DoT tick would be welcome.
Both type of catalyst bonus seems wasted on DoT builds. The Lich has 2 passive skills (symbol of decay, wand of the fallen), one of which is even DoT specific, that specify using a wand without a shield (leaving only catalysts). Scrolls/skulls gives crit chance (which is useless for DoT) while the Aegis gives Ward per Second. But choosing ward as the main defense lock you out of using the death seal skill (as it consumes all ward) and ward-generating uniques such as Last step of the living and Exanguinuous really screw reaper form up-time.
There is a lack of items with +1 to skill compared to other class/builds : Bladed staff gives +1 to melee skill, Dragon staff +1 to elemental skill, but no staff or wand gives a point for necrotic, DoT, curse, poison or spell skills. The Sinathia set gives +2 to curse and +2 to minion but it seems to be targeted at Necromancer since it requires a shield (based on symbol of decay, wand of the fallen in the Lich tree).
Kill threshold don’t work well with DoT builds. It seems to be a on-hit effect, or if it isn’t, most of the skills with kill threshold are hits. Kill threshold is VERY good agains bosses and anything with high HP, as it can amount to a flat 10% damage increase, but it is weird that I have to start poking the boss when it’s on its last leg to see if it dies after spending most of the fight doing my best to position away from it.
At least, changing a boss life-bar color when it hits the insta-kill threshold or displaying the % of life remaining would remove the guesswork from this
Progression and endgame
Gold is weird : I couldn’t get enough of it as I leveled, to respect and buy runes of shattering for fragment, and now I’m sitting at close to half a million and the only “gold sink” is to gamble, which I don’t really enjoy (I’d much rather play). Some rewarding end-game gold sink would be welcome (ex: ability to buy runes/glyph if the rng god don’t smile upon you). Not having a good use for gold also makes echoes gold-reward feels very lackluster, while also being very common.
Completing quest should give you something else if you already have collected all your idol slots and extra passives. I did every quest along the way, only to realize around the last few acts that I was still set to receive passive. These quest extra could award players with a free attribute point or with a glyph of despair (or other rare item) as an incentive for player to complete them on 2nd+ playthrough.
Some echo objectives aren’t as enjoyable for me : I’ve had to run around a few minutes trying to catch up to quick patrols
It is mildly infuriating when you have to kill enemies to reveal the boss, only to find out you went the wrong way and must walk back to the starting point. (Enemies are piñata’s I want to open, tracing back my step due to unknowingly taking a wrong turn feels like a way to stretch time)
A lot of the maps layout feels like rooms connected by corridors. I don’t remember seeing a lot of open map, which would be a welcome change of pace.
I beat the boss around level 60. Being forced to do the first timeline twice while over-leveled (meaning slow XP gain) to unlock both timeline didn’t feel rewarding.
Bugs
DPS tooltip don’t always work : Spirit plague damage do not scale if you pick up “Rotten to the core” and “concentrated rot” but the damage you deal to the dummy do scale. I feel this is important, because as new player try to figure out the game, the tooltip DPS at least gives an idea of which choice is better.
Using Death Seal don’t empy your ward bar (visual), it stays at the level it was when you activated it.
I tend to remote play a lot using the steam app (running the game on my gaming PC, playing from my laptop) as it allows me to keep an eye on the kids. Once every fourth time, the game will hung so bad that even the task manager stop responding.
With all of this being said, I want to reiterate that I’m really enjoying the game. Even for a beta, the game is well polished and he gameplay is fun.
Welcome to the forums & thanks for the feedback… always appreciated by the devs even if they dont have time to reply to every post.
Quite a bit of your feedback is fairly common and some ideas have been discussed in separate threads (sometimes lengthy) by both other players & the devs so there isnt a need to discuss them here too much (you can search the forums if you are interested)…
I’ll pick a few items to respond to now
Lootfilter improvements… Yes, its quite powerful and can get complicated if you want to get down to fine criteria. Its fairly new so its likely that it will get improvements in the future - especially to make things easier for new players.
FP filtering - this has been discussed by the Devs TLDR is that while they are happy with filtering out “junk”, they still want some sort of decision making re drops - i.e. dont want it to become entirely automatic - they want you to look at the drop and make a decision… FP (and LP) filtering is something they are not keen on adding. You can search for more on this topic.
Respec - yip, they are working on improving this for passives.
Filter working in stash & inventory - requested numerous times… no idea if the devs are entertaining this … would be nice tho…
General comment on the DoT feedback - Lots of things are not complete yet so the additon of affixes, items, build specific gear etc… are all still possible and likely… .but we dont usually get info on this until the devs do a class rework… Also, a lot of the viability of certain types of builds (DoT, hit, spell, ailments etc) has been specifically, intentionally designed by the devs to favour certain classes etc… i.e. the best DoT build in the game right now is arguably the Rogue Poison Flurry… but by contrast, building a Rogue elemental on hit build, is really hard to make viable… Just illustrating that sometimes being unable to find something for a build idea may be because the devs intentionally didnt want that specific class to do something like that or use that particular weapon or be good at that particular ailment… As the game gets more content, items and the classes are reworked and finished, this is likely to be very fluid…
Gold is weird… yes… Right now the only REAL use for gold is to buy stash tabs and respec… Recent changes to the gambler mean its usefulness is pretty limited - the devs dont want you gambling, they want you playing for loot drops. This issue has been speculated on many times before but no comment from devs yet.
Quest rewards… This is by design… There are more quests that provide passives/idol slots than you need to do… it used to be that you had to do all quests but as they added more content, you can now chose what side quests you want to do for passives & idol slots… This is even more important now that there are ways to skip entire chapters of content to speed getting to end-game sooner - i.e. you dont need to go back anymore to complete quests for idol slots…
Echo objectives not fun… A lot of this is personal preference… everyone has their favourite echo requirement… Find the wandering patrols is probably not on most peoples favourite list tho. Just wait until you have done hundreds of echos…
Killing to find the boss… I find that this is less of an issue if you focus on clearing these echos (for improved chest rewards) rather than running down one particular direction… this is also probably a factor of experience… eventually you do intuitively know where bosses are likely to spawn on specific maps.
Map design… Corridors… True… The dungeon was the first random map added to the game in the last patch… More map variety is something that has been discussed… there are quite a few open maps in the Campaign, but not so much in the echos for some unknown reason…
Boss at level 60… thats about right for a casual playthrough (i.e. starting Monos at that level)… Doing the multiple “paths” in the early Monos is something that has also been discussed a few times… Personally, I am not fond of it, but I have a feeling its there because at the time the monos were released there was no other content… so it could be possible that they may consider forgoing those second paths once there is more to do in the game…
Tooltips… lots of discussion around that and cofirmation from the devs that they are redoing it all… we hoped for it to drop in 0.8.5 but they said its not ready so we just have to wait.
Never tried to run it via remote play, but the game is generally unoptimised and has performance issues that can cause it to freeze up so its very likely that this could be part of what you are experiencing. Feezing & hanging up without using remote play are usually related to settings being a little too optimistic for the state of the game right now vs the hardware you are using. Anything, like remote play, that can exarcerbate this, is likely to experience some level of instability at the moment… Thankfully the devs are committed to fixing performance - they just have a lot of content to get done too…
Very well written feedback and I can agree on many points you’ve made. Especially Acolyte. She is a bit outdated and needs an overhaul. I’m sure the devs are aware of that and Acolyte will get an update in one of the upcoming patches. Maybe even 0.8.6.
Lootfilter improvements would also be welcome. I played a DoT Lych myself and can completely agree that suffixes are useless for DoT builds and that makes me sad. Adding new weapon suffixes for DoT builds is absolutely needed.
Very nice feedback, very interesting and totally in line with most feedback.
I really hope Lich receives some love quickly, because she’s now old compared to some other masteries.
Thanks for the extensive reply. It is good to learn that a lot of the point I’m making are already discussed, or that this is the result of a conscious design choice.
I had to decide between :
giving my mostly unbiased/fresh feedback from a first playthrough and risk repeating what had already been said, versus
Double checking what was already said on the forum, and risking tainting my opinion in the process (from reading others people thoughts, reasoning and arguments)
I opted for the former. My reasoning was that fresh feedback was probably preferable : if many people say the same thing, it’s probably worth looking into.
Now for the sake of argument :
I understand your point that not every class is designed to be good for every type of play. It is however weird that the Lich wouldn’t be one of the the DoT class, given how many DoT Skills and passive it has.
I agree with the Devs that I don’t want to gamble with gold, and I’d much rather play. But if gold has no uses, removing it from the echo-web rewards should be considered.
Quest reward. I understand now the reason why there are more quest than rewards to snatch. I’d still argue than giving a glyph of despair/class related affix shar or other rare consumable would make it more satisfying to people playing through the campaign.
The devs have already acknowledged the problem. They have confirmed we will have gold sinks, without giving and ETA. Maybe the second new dungeon next patch, but I don’t think so.
What is certain is that, in the future, gold will be useful and we’ll need gold.
I have a feeling that this is purely a factor of how old the class is and changes that have been made to other classes since… I dont know for sure, but I am fairly confident that Acolyte is likely to get some love in the future…
Yah… its been quite a topic of discussion on the forum but the devs are playing their cards close to their chests wrt gold and its potential uses in the future… Who knows…
Honestly, I’d prefer more unique quest only drops like some of the early side quests provide. Shards etc are a dime a dozen later in game… and even specials like despars tend to drop and are a nice chase item… Theoretically it may be nice if side quests had these special items as a reward, but then you would get people just creating throwaway builds to farm side quests for the highly rare chase Runes.
